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A life of service, in synagogue
& in defending fellow workers

Joe Erber has stepped forward to assume responsibility throughout his life, whenever he felt the need. A postal service letter carrier since the age of 25, he quickly got involved with the union after noticing "nobody would speak up for anybody else."

In his position as the postal union's business agent, Joe represents union members in grievances. Some of these go to binding arbitration, and over the years, Joe has developed enormous skill on a foundation of common sense.

For example, consider the 2003 case of the letter carrier accused of sexual harassment of a female "postal patron." Joe questioned the letter carrier on his "offending" remark, about going skinny dipping at the pool in the apartments she managed. First, Joe explained that the incident took place in the "middle of July on a day the heat index was 110 degrees in the shade."

"On the witness stand, I asked [the letter carrier] if the pool looked good to him, good enough to go skinny dipping," said Joe. "That cleared up the 'sexual remark,' and the letter carrier was reinstated."

The synagogue
Joe's grandfather, Ike Gelman [1872 - 1944], was a charter member of the Greenwood, Mississippi, synagogue, founded in 1897. Joe was born in 1941 and remembers back to the early 1950s, when about 130 families were members, filling up the present synagogue building opened in 1923.

His grandfather never conducted High Holy Day services himself, Joe said wistfully, torn between his sadness over the decline of the Jewish population of the South and his pride in carrying the resulting burdens himself these days.

He also presides over Jewish funerals, another job that fell on his shoulders as lay rabbi. Attendance at synagogue services has dwindled to the point that there is often "not even a minyan." But at Rosh Hashonah 2002, service, said Joe, there was a minyan present.

Congregation Ahavath Rayim. This photo of Joe Erber and his uncle, Meyer Gelman (1917- 91), was taken in front of the ark in the Greenwood, Miss., synagogue founded by Meyer's father, Ike Gelman.

The photo, by Bill Aron, appears here with his permission and is in the permanent collection of the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience, in Utica, Miss. It was published in The Atlanta Constitution, and it appeared in the documentary film, Jews of the Delta.
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Editor's note: According to tradition, ten men constitute a minyan, required under Jewish law for a proper service to take place. "When an individual prays, he is praying as one person, but when you have a minyan praying, their prayers represent the entire people of Israel," explained Joe's distant cousin by marriage, the distinguished constitutional scholar, Milton Ridbaz Konvitz [1908 - 2003}, the grandson and son of celebrated rabbis.